Walking along the coast path in Zennor
There's a mermaid I've carried with me since I was eighteen, drawn on a birthday card by a family friend. She's stayed with me ever since, diving down through the water with her hair streaming behind her, and she's part of why this collection exists.
The Mermaids of Zennor's Bench in Zennor Church
But mermaids belong to Cornwall in a way that goes far beyond one card. Walk into the church at Zennor and you'll find her carved into a bench end, six hundred years old, said to have lured a young man named Matthew Trewhella into the sea after he followed her voice down to the cove. Sailors along this coast have told stories for generations of women glimpsed on the rocks at dusk, half seen, half imagined, always just out of reach. Cornwall's coastline lends itself to that kind of story. The mist, the granite, the sea that changes its mood by the hour, all of it feels like it's hiding something.
A small cove along the coast path in Zennor
Mermaids turn up everywhere once you start looking. Greek sirens sang sailors onto the rocks. Selkies in Scottish and Irish folklore slipped between seal and woman. Ningyo appear in Japanese legend, half fish, half human, said to grant long life to whoever ate their flesh. Every coastal culture seems to have needed her, this figure who belongs to both worlds and answers to neither.
A mermaid luring a sailor with her beautiful songs
This collection is our own small addition to that story. Three lampshades, twenty, thirty and forty centimetres, made by us here in our Penryn studio. Three cushions, the mermaid mid dive, a seadragon moving through kelp, a seahorse resting among shells, printed up north and hand made here in Cornwall. As well as, four plain velvet cushions to sit alongside them, seagrass, kelp, aqua and shallows, each one named for a colour the sea shows us on a good day.
She's an old story wherever you find her. This one is ours.
Rebecca x
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